SOURCE: Fried, Kerry. “Criminal Elements.” New York Review of Books 40, nos. 1-2 (14 January 1993): 36-7.

In the following excerpt, Fried examines various aspects of Black Dogs, such as its handling of domestic violence, the importance of Jeremy in comparison to protagonists June and Bernard, its portrayal of the post-World War II period, and the events surrounding the fall of European communism in 1989.

The narrators in Ian McEwan's earlier books tend to live in rarefied, nightmarish domestic situations rather than in precise locations or times. His explorations of solitary lives and domestic futility, and particularly the ruin of childhood, occasionally can seem conceits, as with a boy who has been literally infantilized for eighteen years. There were also potential moral underpinnings in the horror of his stories, and there were, too, the wit and strangeness of his prose.

But his more recent work is very different, carefully grounded in a...